The race for cheerleader-in-chief
By Daniel Luban and Ali Gharib
WASHINGTON - Washington is waiting anxiously on the outcome of Friday's Iranian
presidential elections, as incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attempts to
fend off challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi in a contest with significant
implications for the diplomatic atmosphere between Iran and the United States.
Experts caution that the concrete policy impact of the elections may be
particularly great from a US perspective. Both leading candidates support a
civilian nuclear program, and the president's influence on foreign policy in
general - although a matter of some debate - is relatively small compared to
that of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Nevertheless, the overall tone of the US-Iran relationship is likely to be
affected by whether Ahmadinejad, whose confrontational
style has helped stoke tensions and made him a favorite target for hawks in the
US, is re-elected.
As the campaign comes down to the wire, a great deal of uncertainty remains
about the outcome. In addition to Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, an elder statesman
who was Iran's prime minister during the 1980s, other candidates include former
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Mohsen Rezai and former
Majlis (parliament) speaker and Mehdi Karroubi.
Fairly or unfairly, the election is also likely to be taken as an indicator of
the prospects for success of US President Barack Obama's diplomatic outreach to
Tehran, with the two reformist-leaning candidates, Karroubi and Mousavi,
emphasizing dialogue with the West.
In the US, hawks - who have generally been skeptical of Obama's outreach and
have urged him to act against Iran's uranium enrichment by moving quickly to
harsher measures such as sanctions - have been hammering home the point that
Khamenei calls all the shots.
"Iran's presidents are more cheerleader-in-chief than commander-in-chief,"
prominent Iran hawk Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy (WINEP) told the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. Clawson argues that the
elections matter only because they give the international community a window
into Khamenei's thinking.
But others suggest that although Khamenei may set the broad outlines of Iranian
foreign policy, the president has more latitude in implementing this policy
than is sometimes recognized.
For instance, the president will appoint the diplomats who would engage in
potential negotiations with the West.
"For all their differences on Ahmadinejad's policies, all the candidates back
continuation of uranium enrichment," Robin Wright of the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars said last week at a Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace Forum.
"But it is true that the emphasis, the atmospherics, the climate, the style and
the civility of both foreign and domestic policy could change enormously
depending on who wins," Wright added.
The fact that Iran hawks in the US are emphasizing the relative unimportance of
Iran's presidency may be a sign that they have begun to take seriously the
possibility of a Mousavi victory.
During Ahmadinejad's tenure, those pushing confrontation with Tehran generally
preferred to highlight the president at the expense of the Supreme Leader, as
Ahmadinejad's controversial statements provoked an international uproar and
helped foster alarm about the Islamic Republic.
Ahmadinejad has been favored to win re-election throughout the campaign, but
anecdotal evidence has suggested that Mousavi's support is surging in the final
days. On Tuesday, a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands demonstrated on a
Tehran thoroughfare in support of Mousavi.
The movement around Mousavi has grown through the use of social networking
websites such as Facebook, which was briefly banned by Ahmadinejad's
authorities before being reinstated, and text messages, which were used to get
the word out about Tuesday's rally.
The tactic may be paying off - Mousavi appears to be mobilizing young voters,
especially in the usually apathetic urban centers. Some 60% of Iranian are
under 30 years old - meaning they have no memory of the time before the Islamic
Revolution.
Agence France-Presse reported that the electoral committee was expecting a
record number of the 46.2 million eligible voters to turnout on Friday, which
will likely benefit Mousavi. Some recent polls have also put Mousavi in the
lead, although polling in Iran is notoriously unreliable.
Recent government-funded polls have found that 16 to 18 million Iranians favor
Mousavi, while only 8 million support Ahmadinejad, Newsweek magazine reported.
In any case, the Obama administration has suggested that it is waiting until
after the elections to pursue diplomatic engagement with Tehran.
In May, Obama suggested that his administration would perform a "reassessment"
at the end of the year to judge the progress of diplomacy, although he did not
specify any particular benchmarks that would have to be met by that time.
The president is under a great deal of pressure from both hawks in the US and
the Israeli government to take a hard line against Tehran. The most frequent
suggestion is for his administration to implement sanctions against companies
exporting refined petroleum products to Iran if talks do not soon produce a
breakthrough on the nuclear issue.
However, even some hawks question whether such sanctions would be effective. In
a recent article in The New Republic, Michael Makovsky and Ed Morse - two
members of a Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) task force that last year produced
a hard-line report about the Iranian nuclear program - argued that sanctions
are "unlikely to have much of an impact".
Another member of the BPC task force was Dennis Ross, who is now the Obama
administration's special representative to Iran.
Ross, who was the Bill Clinton administration's top Israeli-Palestinian peace
negotiator and maintains a close relationship with US neo-conservatives, has a
reputation as the administration's most prominent hawk on the Iranian nuclear
issue. According to former National Security Council (NSC) staffers Flynt
Leverett and Hilary Mann Leverett, Ross has stated privately that military
force against Iran will likely be necessary, and that the primary reason to
engage in diplomacy is to build support for military action.
But how much support Ross's views command within the administration remains
unknown, with some suggesting that he is an outlier whose chief role will be to
"sell" any US-Iranian deal to Israel.
"[The Obama administration] wants to try to deal with the Iranian government as
a unitary actor, as opposed to how President Bill Clinton engaged reformers at
the expense of hardliners, and President George W Bush engaged the people at
the expense of the regime," Iran expert Karim Sadjapour of the Carnegie
Endowment told IPS.
Indeed, Obama has repeatedly referred to Iran by its official name, "the
Islamic Republic of Iran", which was shunned by the Bush administration and
still is by hardliners with designs of regime change in Tehran.
Obama's remarks in Cairo about Iran were notably conciliatory. He became the
first president to acknowledge the US role in the 1953 coup that overthrew
democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh
(then-secretary of state Madeline Albright acknowledged as much in 2000). He
also refrained from commenting on Friday's election, saying, "We would never
presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election."
Obama also stated that Iran "should have the right to access peaceful nuclear
power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty", while reiterating his opposition to an Iranian
nuclear weapon.
On Monday, the Boston Globe reported that the Obama administration was looking
into creating a "fuel bank" administered by the International Atomic Energy
Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, which would provide an aboveboard system for
countries looking to develop nuclear power to acquire fuel in a monitored
setting.
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